The Hurting Kind: The Millions Interviews Ada Limón
To read the poetry of Ada Limón is to enter mysteries around life and nature and the world for which she has no answers. She distrusts her own role as an observer and tries to de-emphasize herself, understanding that she cannot truly understand the changing people and creatures around her. As she writes in “Intimacy”:
a clean honesty
about our otherness that feels
not like the moral, but the story.
Her new book, The Hurting Kind, is her sixth collection of poetry and the titular poem about the death of her grandfather captures a lot of this. It is a poem with multiple registers, that seeks to talk about his life and how he would have wanted to be remembered, talk about her grandmother and her family, about how individuals grieve and how a family grieves. It tries to celebrate him while also understanding that he didn’t want to be celebrated. He saw himself as ordinary and Limón wants to record the moment as something ordinary. Grieving is a common human experience, but that doesn’t mean that it is not sacred and important and powerful. Her grandfather was both ordinary and important, and Limón feels similarly about so many things, seeking to celebrate things even as she acknowledges their ordinariness.
Limón is also the host of the podcast The Slowdown, which comes out five days a week, and we spoke about what a poet does with missing, the human and animal experience, and how her mother paints all her book covers.
Alex Dueben: Thanks again for doing this. And it’s nice to see you. I listen to you daily on The Slowdown, so it’s odd to see you because I know your voice so well.
Ada Limón: That’s wonderful! I’m alone a lot and writing these things by myself and then I’m recording in my bedroom and so when people tell me they listen I’m like, Oh good! There is someone out there!
AD: I’ve never been to one of your readings, but your poems have a musicality. You’ve always seemed very interested in the sound of a poem.
I am. I want to say the sound is the biggest driver for me because I’m interested in music, but I’m also interested in how the poem really is like music on the page. It really is a whole-body experience. It’s meant to be read out loud.
